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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dale_laroy who wrote (59577)	10/22/2001 4:45:08 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Dale: Alpha penetrated markets. Most of these were DEC shops running either VMS or Ultrix. Most of these sites switched to Alpha with little fanfare. DEC's main advantage to IBM or any others mainframe systems was the ability to cluster. Alpha did this in spades. So your interpretation is quite flawed. And you forget that performance and compatability is a big draw. And price is a huge draw. Having all three could switch away all the OEMs from Itanium. There is no current market where Itanium Dominates. Some time in the future plans do not make much of a difference. OEMs are fickle. If Itanium doesn't outrun current systems, the OEMs could simply say that they will restart or continue their current RISC systems. HP has a new PA-RISC in the works, IBM a Power4 CPU, Sun has theirs and even Intel could go back to Xeon. And every day it looks like IA-64 is falling behind more and more. Just like many other "can't lose" propositions. Remember Microchannel? How about Futurebus? Rambus? Or how about the big x86 RISC replacement i860? There are many examples of something that supported by the biggest name in an area and although it looks like a "can't miss sure thing", it falls flat on its face because of irrational arrogance. Take an example. A large company needs to replace its MRP/ERP system because the of the new goals of management. They do a search for MRP/ERP software that does all of the things they need. They find an ideal package with some extras that make it highly desirable. The systems it currently runs on are HP PA-RISC (5 yrs exp), IBM Power (3 yrs exp), Sun (4 years), Compaq (DEC) Alpha (6 yrs exp) and x86 SCO Unix (5 yrs exp). They are willing to write an Itanium version, but it will take an extra year and you would be the first. You know the drill, they will take the one with the highest experience, performance and lowest cost in that order. That gives them either Compaq, HP or a x86 OEM. Itanium would not be on the list (not ready yet and this company doesn't want to be a pioneer). This result is why you cannot call IA-64 established. And of the tens of thousands of applications out there (we are taking VARs, system integrators and software houses here) and even Intel with all of its resources could not afford to have the code ported to IA-64 (it would run into the 10's of billions easy and that is with a good optimizing stable compiler (and that is still not available) and reliable development environment). The closest historical parallel would be the 8080 to Z80 switch or the 286 to 386 switch. They did not require a recompile to run old systems faster. And they had a new mode that made them faster and gave them additional abilities that were very desired (the 286 to 386 switch vastly simplified the needed code models and made it easy to use much larger amounts of memory (no one I know would ever want to switch back to the 286 model and MMU)). Pete